


To Know Fear

by AnnaStachia



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Gertrude is a boss, Jonah is a smug bstd, Mentions of Gertrude Robinson, Mentions of Jonathan Sims, Mentions of Mordechai Luka, Mentions of Robert Smirke, Mentions of Simon Fairchild, Mentions of a bunch of others - Freeform, Mentions of of Peter Lukas, canon-typical entity weirdness, extinction what extinction, headcanons oh headcanons, jonah is just a big troll, jonah magnus character study, lonelyeyes if you squint really really hard, no beta we die like probably something horrific, spoilers up to 159, taking canon liberties
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-07 22:07:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21224990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnaStachia/pseuds/AnnaStachia
Summary: Jonah Magnus would consider himself the foremost expert on the Dread Powers that permeate the edges of the world.- -Jonah Magnus and his relationship with the fear entities.





	To Know Fear

**Author's Note:**

> I sat down to write some good ol' Peter/Elias, and I ended up writing Jonah Magnus character study. This is mostly canon compliant, with some liberties on timelines, and some headcanon added for flavor and introspection. Please enjoy!

Jonah Magnus would consider himself the foremost expert on the fear entities that permeate their world. It goes without saying really. Even aside from his connection to Beholding, he’s been studying them since he and his compatriots became aware of their presence over two centuries ago. Through many sacrifices and prolonged experiments he feels he has a great understanding of what they are, and what they are capable of. 

Founding the institute had been a further step in keeping track of the fears and their activities, as well as feeding the cravings that had settled within him. He really is proud of the concept, a stroke of genius. A place for people to come and feed him their experiences with the paranormal, their run ins with these dread powers. It made it almost far too easy to keep track of them and their players they have on the board. They Eye sees all, and he’s more than happy to foster that belief. 

After all, it is mostly true.

It hadn’t been long after the Institute’s founding that Mordechai Lukas approached him with a deal. Many in Robert Smirk’s particular circle of friends knew what Jonah wanted to accomplish when he started looking into the construction of Milbank prison’s panopticon, what that could mean for a potential agent of the eye. And Jonah always played it vague with his associations. But that didn’t mean they didn’t have their suspicions, and Mordechai despite his way with people can be strangely insightful.

Rayner had caught on sometime later, when the tunnels began construction. He’d try to buy into the prison (which Jonah had already invested heavily in) to buy it out from under him, but Smirke knew Rayner’s intentions and blocked him at every turn. He would have rather Jonah had control of the panopticon, having trusted Jonah up until the end. Believing that he would never fully give into the powers. A trust Jonah never failed to play to his advantage.

Mordechai had no designs to take what Jonah had cultivated for himself, at least not back then. He only wanted to share, and in return, Jonah would never have to worry about the institute going under. It was a deal Jonah was happy to accept. He knew that crossing Mordechai could result in dreadful consequences, and it kept the Lukas’ tied lossely to the Institute. That way he always had his eye on them. 

It was much later that his alliance with the Web had forged, no thanks to his repeated attempts to garner Walter Fielding’s favor. An entirely different spider had approached him, offering that they could be of mutual assistance to each other. Jonah will never fully trust puppeteering avatars of the web, and out of all the others, it’s the Mother of Puppets he’s never been able to keep any real track of. So he saw this as a perfect opportunity, probably just as the web had hoped he would. 

His Archivist back then - at the time an experiment of sorts - tried to warn him against the association, but Jonah had brushed it off. Better to be aligned with the web, then to be enemies. As long as she didn’t stop him from accomplishing his goals, the spiders could weave their designs. 

The tenuous relationship with The Spiral had been a complete accident and not by his design what-so-ever. Fundamentally Beholding is at odds with Those-Who-Lie, almost as much as it is with Darkness. Jonah would never have accepted its presence within his walls if he could have helped it. No, that had been entirely the fault of Gertrude Robinson. The woman had been remarkably good at one thing, and that was using unconventional means to foil other fears from garnering too much power. He let her have her way because it made his own job easier, even if it wasn’t the sole purpose of the Archivist. 

But merging one of her assistants to the Distortion, while stopping its ritual had brought the blasphemous creature to their doorstep. Quite literally. He had been able to strike a tentative bargain with the being calling itself Michael, one with very loose terms. Thanks to whatever part of the Distortion that retained the humanity it had absorbed that bargain still holds under Helen’s control. 

His dealings with the so-called Fairchilds have been for the most part amicable, though Jonah isn’t particularly fond of Simon. Peter Lukas once told him it was because he and Simon were too similar. A statement he had taken great offense to. Peter had also suggested that he might be envious. Simon had a few centuries on Jonah, and more experience in the realm of this particular form of esoteric He had also balked at that. 

The others, those he doesn’t or wouldn’t bother forming any sort of alliance or camaraderie with, he watches and tracks between his own personal brand of surveillance and the system of statements and archives. The Flesh he’s been following since near to its emergence. Thankfully it’s not very subtle. Though the recent business with Jared Hopworth had been quite unpleasant and very poorly timed. He doesn’t appreciate the invasion of his institute while he is otherwise occupied. 

The Desolation’s servants made themselves easy to keep track on. With their particular brand for burning and boiling their victim’s were easy to find. Not to mention that, similar to the Dark they had amassed a cult. Cult’s are easy to see, even easier to follow. He had been somewhat more concerned with them, back during Agnes’ prime. But Gertrude had seen to that, as she had much else. Now they’re just the sad, pathetic remnants of a failed experiment. 

Those that worship the Dark should perhaps worry him more. But Jonah is more than familiar with Maxwell Raynor, and considers the man something of an idiot. He’s like a rat or a cockroach, able to survive but otherwise a pest on society. The Dark should be the hardest entity for him to follow, but they make themselves easy to find. They worship their power, look at it as some god come to bring them to a pitch black salvation. Their “church” isn’t subtle. Jonah can’t see them as he might normally see others, but he can track them none-the-less. 

In contrast he considers the Stranger to be more dangerous than most. Aside from its fundamentally differing ideals, servants of the Stranger are almost entirely alien. Most avatars are people who have been touched by their fears, inspired by them, and granted gifts to help them feed their driving force. Avatars of the Stranger, as far as he can tell, have never been human. They take human appearances, they try to mimic human behavior, but they are alien. That makes them an unknown quantity, and Jonah does not appreciate the unknown. 

Once he and Smirke had theorized that perhaps they had been human. That when the Stranger takes a victim it turns them into something else, and then that something spends its existence trying to be human again, therefore creating more victims. It’s not a theory Jonah’s discarded, but there have been enough outliers that it can’t be the full story. 

Letting one of its Not!Humans run around his Institute for months had set him on edge. If he hadn’t deemed it to be a necessary step for his Archivist, he would have disposed of the creature the moment it arrived. 

Much in the same way he had taken the Prentiss incident. The Corruption on the whole isn’t a force that worries him any. It’s just…_disgusting_. Knowing those worms were invading the Institute through the tunnels was enough to make his skin crawl. He’d been more than happy to provide the Archival team with the means to dispose of them, even if that means was owed to the Distortion. 

He’d had no doubt that Prentiss would have been stopped, and the Corruption proved a good first test for his current Archivist. 

The Buried is much more passive and situational to where Jonah doesn’t feel he has to keep a constant lookout for it. Though much more recent events might change that. Gertrude having stopped its ritual a decade ago, and his current Archivist having destroyed one of its unwilling servants (the other destroyed another of Jonah’s employees), and his Archvist then throwing himself into Forever-Deep-Below-Creation and coming back out - a supposedly impossible feat - with another victim. The Choke can’t be happy with the Institute. Still, it’s lower on his list of priorities for now. 

In the meantime, The Hunt and the Slaughter had both unknowingly walked in the front door of his domain. It had been all he could do not to laugh outwardly. At least with those two, unwitting victims it had been too easy to tie them to the Institute, and to him. 

Other than his guard dog and the access Melanie King allowed him to the Slaughter, he’s always kept a wary eye on both. Many human avatars of the Hunt tried to maintain a pesky sense of their morality which often resulted in them hunting “monsters”. Also known as other avatars. Like the troublesome vampire hunter and his little pup. 

The Slaughter is an interesting concept because it seemed like it should be dangerous by name and design, but it was really just so… _mundane._ Oh a bunch of people turned violent and tore each other apart. How droll.

Not to mention its inherent manifestation in war. Another idle theory Jonah has toyed with is that the Slaughter completed its ritual long, long ago and this world - with it’s two world wars, almost constant civil wars, cold wars, with terrorists, mass shootings, and imminent nuclear death - is the result. There’s no way to prove it, and seemingly at least one Slaughter ritual has been attempted in the last century, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility either. 

Of course he doesn’t give The End much thought other than his eventual mortality. Even that isn’t something he oft considers. In all honesty Jonah doesn’t plan on dying. When his own ritual is complete he will be beyond death’s reach, and Death is the most passive of all entities. Almost everything dies eventually. Even Simon Fairchild will die someday, at least he can home. If death every does catch him, it won’t be because of any efforts of The End or its disciples.

There are those few End avatars out there that actively seek sacrifice believing its what their dread power wants. But its true avatars understand that death comes for everyone. 

As for Jonah himself, and Beholding, this was always where he was going to end up. There was a time, early on, that he had resisted its pull. As he watched Mordechai fall into solitude, had his first brush with the man who would become Simon Fairchild, he held to Smirke’s preachings of balance. Creating the Magnus Institute had initially been an attempt to find that balance, but it wasn’t long after that he started to give up that resistance. The more he came to understand, the more willing he was to accept the siren’s call of the Watcher, the call of knowing.

The more he learned, the better he felt, and he started seeking out these incidents, or even orchestrating them when possible. People were so easy to manipulate. The Eye allowed him a freedom and sense of belonging he had never quite felt before. 

While he enjoyed manipulating people into situations and experiences, the ever increasing number of statements and the growing reputation of the Magnus Institute, became more than he could handle himself with just a minimal amount of staff. Not to mention his strengthening abilities and the hunger that became more and more difficult to satisfy. He had to turn his eye on more to keep himself satiated. 

Then Smirke had come up with the rituals, designs for the dread powers to bring themselves further into reality. Based off research from the likes of Fairchild and Rayner, he devised plans for all of them. Jonah would never know what possessed him to do so, except maybe his pull from The Eye. But Jonah knew then that he would wear the Watcher’s Crown one day, and began plotting how to bring it to fruition. 

That had been the inspiration for the Archivist idea. Jonah, at his heart, was an observer, a watcher himself. He may have been the original Archivist of the Institute, but that was no longer a position he could maintain. At some point he had ascended beyond that, become the heart of the Institute. So someone else must take up that position, to read, to listen, to experience, and to catalogue and archive. And to investigate and learn about the dread powers intimately. To know them in a way no one else has ever known them. 

It had been experimental at first. There was no guarantee that using a vessel Archivist would grant him the power in the end, but he had enough confidence in the power he had put into the Institute and the panopticon that the power would belong to him. If nothing else he could always use the old trick of transferring his consciousness before the ritual was complete.

As with most experiments, the first attempt is never a success, and he learned much for the next one. He had started out sharing his knowledge freely, or nearly so, and the man he’d chosen had been quite keen. But in his knowledge he became too cautious, unwilling to put himself in situations where he might cross the powers of a fear. Eventually Jonah had to organize the man’s death. 

He still remembers the look on his face as he gave him the assignment. He knew Jonah was sending him to his death, and there was nothing he could do about it. He left a final statement, and it had been maybe the most delicious thing Jonah had consumed in years. 

He went through four more before he found Gertrude. Some of them hadn’t lasted more than five years. One managed to survive almost twenty-one years, but they nearly figured out the ritual and weren’t content to be Jonah’s puppet. They wanted to take Jonah’s place. He’d had to call in a favor with the Mother of Puppets to take care of that one, in an appropriately thematic way. 

Gertrude had been promising. She loved mysteries, and solving them, diving right into her job as the new Archivist. Jonah had admired her gumption for a long time. She was clever, wiley, and perhaps most of all, proactive. She wasn’t content to sit around and only research what she found.

So when she discovered the rituals of other entities she was eager to put a stop to them. In retrospect Jonah should have realized that things were almost too easy with her. His Archivist throwing herself into every situation, practically setting herself up to complete the Beholding ritual. 

After thirty years of little issue he grew content. He knew she had designs of her own. She understood the scope of the world they lived in, what the dread powers represented, and pent her time researching how to stop them. Her methods were often ruthless but necessary. Yet she never gave herself fully to Beholding. That _had_ been his first clue, but he had realized it too late. 

Gertrude is the only person who came close to pulling one over on him, and it would have resulted in his death. He had caught on to her game, the more time she spent in the tunnels, but it had taken some time to suss out her plan. He hated having to kill her. Years of progress, wasted. If there is anything Jonah truly despises it’s wasted potential. 

After Gertrude he knew he had to be much more careful with Jonathan Sims. In some ways it turned out not to be as necessary. Perhaps because of who he is, or possibly from his brush with the Web as a child, Jon proved easy to manipulate.

It has been unconventional to say the least, yet incredibly effective. In just under five years he is nearly ready to complete the Watcher’s Crown. Even if he had to spend several months in prison and turn control of the institute over to Peter Lukas of all people. A gamble that had turned out better than expected.

Jonah Magnus is about to culminate two hundred years of work and he couldn’t be more pleased with himself.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think in a comment. Come flail at me about all these poor, suffering folks! (Except Jonah, we know he's not suffering rn) I can be found on twitter @ariescantus, but my twitter isn't all that interesting. And one day I'll actually write that LonelyEyes this was supposed to be.
> 
> Thank you!


End file.
